With increasing availability of inexpensive communications bandwidth, remote computing or cloud computing, where processing and storage resources may be located remotely from the point of usage of the processing and storage resources, has become more widely available. Third party entities may offer these remote computing resources to organizations and individual users when the third party entities are located remotely with respect to the organizations and users. Remote computing methods may, therefore, enable an organization to outsource its information technology needs to an outside vendor and allow the outside vendor to provide processing and storage resources, as well as maintenance, information security, scalability, reliability, and the like.
The third party providers of the remote computing resources may, in turn, make relatively effective use of computing resources by centralizing the resources and providing computing resources to multiple organizations and users. In so doing, remote computing providers may have a plurality of computers or servers and a plurality of storage devices to meet the computing and storage needs of the multiple organizations and/or individuals for whom the remote computing providers provide service. The remote computing resources, and in particular, computing storage capacity that is used by one organization or user, may subsequently be provided to another organization or user by the providers of the remote computing resources. When providing the storage capacity to a new user or organization, for various reasons including data security, the storage capacity may need to be reliably wiped or erased. It may also be necessary to verify that the storage capacity has been reliably wiped or erased prior to letting new users access the storage capacity. In some cases, verifying that the storage capacity has been reliably wiped or erased may be time-consuming and may use computing, energy, or other resources.